Potato paella

I had a surprising degree of success with a 'potato paella'; I basically followed the recipe for 'chicken paella' in the local magazine, using the scraps of meat I managed to remember to salvage off the chicken carcases sold for stock at the market (I generally forget to take them out and scrape off the good bits once the meat is cooked, and simply boil the whole lot to jelly, edible scraps and all!)

Except that instead of adding rice to the onions softened in chorizo-flavoured oil, I added thinly-sliced new potato and red pepper with the turmeric and smoked paprika, and continued frying the vegetables for another 10 minutes or so, then added an old potato cut up into small cubes along with the chicken stock, lemon juices, olives, scraps of meat, etc. (I also added a handful of frozen peas at the last minute, when the stock had almost entirely reduced, which I gather is likewise deemed a cultural crime against the Catalans.)

It tasted very good, the potato being basically simply a vehicle for the flavouring -- provided you used paprika, chorizo and chicken stock it would probably come out much the same whatever form of starch was added!

Bike lights and bits

Yet another set of bike repairs -- a second attempt at the lighting system. It turns out that the problem was that the *last* time the lighting system was repaired (May 20th; contacts on front lamp cleaned and re-crimped), the cables to the rear lamp were somehow swapped over. The dynamo presumably provides alternating current, so it shouldn't theoretically make any difference which is current out and which is the current returning... but switching the two plugs over caused the back light duly to shine brightly instead of flickering its back-up LEDs, and restored function to the front light, which wasn't working at all unless the back light was unplugged!

( Simple Way shoes )

I also decided to 'pot up' my back-up chillies. Of course they are much too young for that (there is a lot of seed in there which turns out still to be in the process of germinating, and naturally I shall have far too many seedlings), but they really can't stay in a shallow coffee-jar lid on the window sill for much longer. The biggest ones already have an L-shaped root where it had hit the bottom of the soil at a very early stage.